There was no next time, and I did not get to meet Jack Kirby.

I had known his work, though, for about as long as I had been able to read, seen it on imported American comics or on the two-color British reprints that I grew up on. With Stan Lee, he created the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four (and all that we got from that, the Inhumans and the Silver Surfer and the rest), the Mighty Thor (where my own obsession with myth probably began).

And then, when I was eleven or twelve, Kirby entered my consciousness as more than the other half of Smilin' Stan and Jolly Jack. There were house ads in the DC Comics titles I was reading, that told me that Kirby Was Coming. And that he was coming to . . . Jimmy Olsen. It seemed the least likely title Kirby could possibly turn up on. But turn up on Jimmy Olsen he did, and I was soon floundering delightedly in a whirl of unlikely concepts that were to prove a gateway into a whole new universe.

Kirby's Fourth World turned my head inside out. It was a space opera of gargantuan scale played out mostly on Earth with comics that featured (amongst other things) a gang of cosmic hippies, a super escape artist, and an entire head-turning pantheon of powerful New Gods. Nineteen seventy-three was a good year to read comics.

And it's the Iggy Pop and the Stooges title from 1973 that I think of when I think of Jack Kirby. The album was called Raw Power, and that was what Jack had, and had in a way that nobody had before or since. Power, pure and unadulterated, like sticking knitting needles into an electrical socket. Like the power that Jack conjured up with black dots and wavy lines that translated into energy or flame or cosmic crackle, often imitated (as with everything that Jack did), never entirely successfully.

Jack Kirby created part of the language of comics and much of the language of superhero comics. He took vaudeville and made it opera. He took a static medium and gave it motion. In a Kirby comic the people were in motion, everything was in motion. Jack Kirby made comics move, he made them buzz and crash and explode. And he created . . .

He would take ideas and notions and he would build on them. He would reinvent, reimagine, create. And more and more he built things from whole cloth that nobody had seen before. Characters and worlds and universes, giant alien machines and civilizations. Even when he was given someone else's idea he would build it into something unbelievable and new, like a man who was asked to repair a vacuum cleaner, but instead built it into a functioning jet-pack.

(The readers loved this. Posterity loved this. At the time, I think, the publishers simply pined for their vacuum cleaners.) Page after page, idea after idea. The most important thing was the work, and the work never stopped.

I loved the Fourth World work, just as I loved what followed it-Jack's magical horror title, The Demon; his reimagining of Planet of the Apes (a film he hadn't seen) as Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth; and I even loved, to my surprise (because I didn't read war comics, but I would follow Jack Kirby anywhere), a World War 2 comic called The Losers. I loved OMAC: One Man Army Corps. I even liked The Sandman-a Joe Simonwritten children's story that Jack drew the first issue of, and which would wind up having a perhaps disproportionate influence on the rest of my life.

Kirby's imagination was as illimitable as it was inimitable. He drew people and machines and cities and worlds beyond imagining-beyond my imagining anyway. It was grand and huge and magnificent. But what drew me in, in retrospect, was always the storytelling, and, in contrast to the hugeness of the imagery and the impossible worlds, it was the small, human moments that Kirby loved to depict. Moments of tenderness, mostly. Moments of people being good to each other, helping or reaching out to each other. Every Kirby fan, it seems to me, has at least one story of his they remember not because it awed them, but because it touched them.

I did not meet Jack Kirby. Not in the flesh. And I wish I had walked across that room and shaken his hand and, most importantly, said thank you. But Kirby's influence on me, just like Kirby's influence on comics, was already set in stone, written across the stars in crackling bolts of black energy dots and raw power, and honestly that's all that matters.

Neil Gaiman September 2007, London P.S.: In a perfect universe you would walk around a huge Kirby museum and stare at Kirby originals and also at the printed and colored versions of Kirby's art, and Mark Evanier would stroll along beside you, telling you about what you were looking at, what it is, when and how Jack did it and why, because Mark is wise and funny and the best-informed guide you could have. He knows stuff. This is not a perfect world and that museum does not exist, not yet, so you will have to settle for Mark Evanier on the page.

The introduction to Mark Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics, 2008.

The Simon and Kirby Superheroes

I've written about Jack Kirby in the past, about the power and the energy of his art and his storytelling. He was one of the people who made comics what they are today. He was the most dynamic, most innovative, most creative (if we were only talking quantity, not quality, given the list of important comics characters Jack co-created, he'd still be a giant) artist in twentieth-century comics.

Take that as read. It's true. In this book you'll see beautiful Simon and Kirby work: you'll watch Jack's art move from the fluid and powerful work he was doing in the 1940s to something much closer to his later "Kirbyesque" style: jaws get craggier, anatomy and ways of representing things become more personal. You'll see some art assists by others, as well: the Ditko work in particular is a delight (and I am sure I can see some Ditko pencils in there with Jack's in the jungle Stuntman story).

There is praise aplenty out there for Jack Kirby. That's not why I wanted to write this introduction. This is my chance to write about Joe Simon. I've never met Joe Simon, but he's been a part of my life for over forty years. I wonder sometimes who I would be today, if not for Joe Simon.

After all, Joe Simon wrote Sandman. First he and Jack reinvented the mysterious night avenger with the gasmask (it was not they who put him into a yellow and purple skintight costume and gave him a kid sidekick, but they were the ones who made it work). And then, thirty years later, Joe Simon brought back the Sandman. He teamed up with Jack Kirby for the first time in many years for a one-shot, the Dream Stream incarnation of the Sandman, who had nothing in common with his predecessor except the name; an "eternal being, outside time" who, with the nightmares Brute and Glob in tow, rescued a boy named Jed from bad dreams and the things that were causing them. I bought my copy of Sandman #1 from a comics dealer in South London, put it into a bag, and began to wonder who this strange figure in his red and yellow costume was. The things that Joe didn't explain were as powerful for me as the things that he did.

Nearly twenty years later, I would write Sandman.

Joe Simon (who created Captain America and so much else) was doing more, always, than just writing comics, but Joe Simon is a remarkable writer of comics. In his 1940s heyday he wrote comics that were always powerful, always filled with energy and madness, stories that simply never stopped moving. They were filled with larger-than-life characters, with strange caricature-villains. They were pure story, filled with Joe Simon's own energy, which was unlike anyone else's. And, very often, even if lopsidedly, they were funny.

He did little work for DC Comics in the sixties and seventies: He wrote Brother Power the Geek, the story of a dressmaker's dummy who comes to life as a hippy, and is fired off into space, and Prez, a comic about the first teenage president of the USA. They were drawn by Jerry Grandenetti. In the only issue of Swamp Thing I ever wrote, I brought Brother Power the Geek back down to Earth. Later, with artist Michael Allred, I would retell the story of Prez, from Prez #1, as if it were a synoptic gospel. I love playing with Joe Simon's toys. One of the first projects I pitched to DC Comics was a revival of Boy Commandos, 1987 style, another great Simon and Kirby comic from the 1940s.

But none of those were the things that would change my life. Sandman was. And it started with the Simon/Kirby Sandman from the 1970s-wondering what would happen if you took him a little more seriously, wondering why he dressed like that, what the sand was for, whether he looked different if he was in someone else's dream.

I talked about my ideas to DC Comics' former president Jenette Kahn and editor Karen Berger when they were in England, and some months later wound up being invited to write a monthly Sandman comic, but to use my ideas about Joe's work as a jumping-off point and do something else (since writer Roy Thomas would be writing his own stories using the Simon/Kirby Sandman). It changed my life, and I owe it to Joe Simon.

And I think what attracted me to Simon's stories was how unlike anyone else's they were, how full of life. He created strange villains: part cartoon, part caricature, part embodiment of whatever he wished to talk about. While the trends in comics were towards realism in writing, Joe Simon marched in the opposite direction, creating his own reality. One of my favorite early-twentieth-century American authors is Harry Stephen Keeler, a mystery writer who wrote stories that were, in terms of plot, dialogue, and geography, nothing like anyone else's. He was derided for it at the time, but is now collected and remembered while many of his contemporaries are forgotten. He was an odd writer. Joe Simon plotted more efficiently than Keeler, but, like Keeler, he wrote stories that no one else could have written, and they linger in the memory and in the heart.

The oddness of Joe Simon's work is where it gets its power.

Joe Simon stories-and the Simon and Kirby stories you'll read in this book-make no pretense of being anyone else's art or stories. They are in motion all the way, or almost: they begin with something happening, they pile on the event, and only end, when they end, at the final panel, or the penultimate, leaving a final panel of exposition and explanation and plot wrap almost as an afterthought: they hurtle until they stop.

Here you'll see that pattern over and over. And you'll see stories and characters that shouldn't work, or rather, that under anyone else's hand wouldn't work, that work like a dream.

Jack Kirby was inimitable, and the Simon-Kirby team was inimitable.

These are things that people who love comics know.

But you know something else? There's never been another Joe Simon.

The Introduction to The Simon and Kirby Superheroes, 2010.

The Spirit of Seventy-Five

The first Spirit comic I bought was the Harvey Spirit #2. I bought it from Alan Austin's shop, which was not a shop but a basement with occasional opening hours, in those antediluvian days of 1975 when there were no comic shops, somewhere in South London.

It was the last day of school. And instead of doing all the things we were meant to do on the last day of school, I snuck out of school and got on a bus with my friend Dave Dickson, and went off to South London. Dave was a lot smaller than me, and had hurt his foot recently. (I have not told anyone this story for fifteen years. But back when I did tell it, if Dave was around he would leap in early and tell people he had hurt his foot, at the beginning of the story. So they knew.) On the way to the shop we were mugged, very badly. Badly is probably not quite the word I want to use. Ineptly might be closer to the truth. The mugger was only a little older than we were, skinny and extremely nervous. He was trailing along behind us.

"Eh," he shouted. We carried on walking.

"Eh," he said again. We were getting further away from him.

He ran alongside us and shouted, "Hey! I've got a knife in my pocket. Give me your money."

I looked him up and I looked him down and, with the arrogance and refusal to be impressed of a fourteen-year-old boy, I told him, "You have not got a knife in your pocket."

"Yes, I do."

"You don't."

"Do."

"You have not got a knife in your pocket." I mean, he didn't have a knife. I was almost certain that he didn't have a knife.

"I do."

"No, you don't. Show it to me. If you've got a knife, let's see it."

I started to suspect that I was going to win this particular argument. At any rate, he said, "Look, whether or not I've got a knife in my pocket, give me your money."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because," I said flatly, "it's my money. Not yours. Now go away."

And he seemed ready to leave, when Dave Dickson, who was quite terrified (and who had, remember, hurt his foot), stammered out the first thing he had said during the whole mugging. He said, "How much do you want?"

And our mugger turned back to me and said, "How much have you got?"

I thought about this. I had forty English pounds on me: money I had saved up over the whole term, saved for this end-of-term comics-buying blowout. More money than I had ever had on me at one time in my whole fourteen-year-old life. (It would probably have been equivalent to about a hundred 1975 dollars.) "I've got twenty pence on me," I told him, grudgingly. "But I need ten pence for the bus home."

"Give me ten pence then," said the mugger.

So I did, and he went away. "You weren't a lot of help," I told Dave.

"I hurt my leg," he said. "So I couldn't run away. It was all right for you. You could have run away."

When we got to the basement comic shop, it was closed. We knocked on the door until it was opened.

"Go away," said Alan Austin. "We're closed."

"But," I said, "we came all the way here from Croydon, and we got mugged and I've got all my money for the whole term with me!"

I think it was the mugging that impressed them, more than the money. Anyway, they let us in. I bought lots of old comics, but all I remember now is Sandman #1, Creepy #1, and The Spirit #2. We read them on the bus, on the way home. I thought The Spirit was the coolest thing in the whole world.

"I'm Plaster of Paris, the toast of Montmartre, I stick to my man until death us do part!" That was one of the stories in there. I had no idea that the stories I was reading were over-thirty-year-old reprints: they were as up-to-date and immediate as anything I had ever read.

I had always wanted to be a writer of comics: now I decided I was also going to be a comic artist when I grew up, and to celebrate this decision, I drew a picture of the Spirit with his shirt ripped and everything. I sent it to Comics Unlimited, a British fanzine edited by the same Alan Austin who owned the basement comic shop. The drawing came back with a letter from Alan, telling me that they had recently improved the standard of their fan art, and now they had people like Jean-Daniel Breque drawing for them, and they were sorry they couldn't print it. I decided that I wouldn't be a comics artist when I grew up after all.

By the time I was seventeen I had stopped buying comics. There was nothing I wanted to read that I could find in comics anymore; I became quite grumpy about the medium. Except for the Spirit. I kept reading and buying Spirit reprints-the older Warren ones and the current Kitchen Sink ones. The stories never palled and the joy of reading them never faded. (A couple of years later, as a young journalist, I was very jealous of my school friend Geoff Notkin, who was studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York, under Will Eisner himself. This seemed almost unfair somehow, like getting God in to run your Bible studies group.) And then time went on, and all of a sudden, I was writing comics.

Since being a comics-writing person, I have met Will on many occasions, all over the world: in Germany and San Diego and Dallas and Spain.

I remember watching Will receive an award for life achievement in Germany, the thrill of seeing a thousand people on their feet and clapping until their hands hurt and then we still clapped, and Will looked modestly embarrassed, and Ann Eisner beamed like a lighthouse.

The last time we met was on the north coast of Spain, where the world fades out into a kind of warm autumnal haze. We spent almost a week together, Will and Ann, and Jaime and Koko Hernandez, and me, a tight-knit fraternity of people who spoke no Spanish. One day Ann and Will and I walked down along the edge of the sea. We walked for a couple of miles, talking about comics, and the medium, and the history of the medium, and the future of comics, and the Spirit, and the people Will had known. It was like a guided tour of the medium we loved. I found myself hoping that when I got to be Will's age I could be that sharp, that wise, that funny.

I told Will, when we were walking, that even when I stopped reading comics I read The Spirit, and I told him that it was his Spirit stories that had left me wanting to write comics, and that the Sandman, like the Spirit, was conceived as a machine for telling stories.

But I didn't tell him that a drawing of the Spirit began and ended my career as a fan artist. Nor did I ever tell him just how badly I was mugged, on my way to buy my first Spirit.

I wrote this for the Chicago Comics Convention "ashcan" tribute to Will Eisner in 1996.